Thank you's and suggestions thread for Amalux's tutorial and packages, topic is here

Lancelot

**************Service Note*************

Hmm, this has got me stumped at the first hurdle. I keep getting a Verify error but it doesn't give me enough information to work out what is failing.

The WBVerify.log shows:

Generated by psc program 'WBVerify' version 2.0.0Date: 2008-Mar-10 22:15:30

[Counts]Missing=0Obsolete=0Errors=1Warnings=0

Errors:"This project needs XP or W2003 as source"---------------------------------------------------I've definately got the I386 folder from an XP Pro SP2 disc on my HD (in I:\XPPSP2\) and in Winbuilder, the Source Directory is set to I:\XPPSP2\. Winbuilder.exe and all the subdirs are in I:\WinBuilder074. BootSDI files are in a subdir under WinBuilder.

I double-checked the tutorial and noticed that it says to put WinBuilder on the active drive, so I moved it to C: and tried again but got the same error (does it actually matter which drive WinBuilder is on?).

UPDATE: I've just looked through the log again and noticed that it appears to check in the %SourceDir% for a WIN51 file to determine which OS is being used. Of course, that file wasn't there because I'd only copied the I386 folder to that directory. Once I copied the WIN51 files from the root of my CD to the %SourceDir% everything seems to work. I can't see anything in the tutorial about copying these files, so perhaps it's been overlooked.

Hmm, this has got me stumped at the first hurdle. I keep getting a Verify error but it doesn't give me enough information to work out what is failing.

The WBVerify.log shows:

Generated by psc program 'WBVerify' version 2.0.0Date: 2008-Mar-10 22:15:30

[Counts]Missing=0Obsolete=0Errors=1Warnings=0

Errors:"This project needs XP or W2003 as source"---------------------------------------------------I've definately got the I386 folder from an XP Pro SP2 disc on my HD (in I:\XPPSP2\) and in Winbuilder, the Source Directory is set to I:\XPPSP2\. Winbuilder.exe and all the subdirs are in I:\WinBuilder074. BootSDI files are in a subdir under WinBuilder.

I double-checked the tutorial and noticed that it says to put WinBuilder on the active drive, so I moved it to C: and tried again but got the same error (does it actually matter which drive WinBuilder is on?).

UPDATE: I've just looked through the log again and noticed that it appears to check in the %SourceDir% for a WIN51 file to determine which OS is being used. Of course, that file wasn't there because I'd only copied the I386 folder to that directory. Once I copied the WIN51 files from the root of my CD to the %SourceDir% everything seems to work. I can't see anything in the tutorial about copying these files, so perhaps it's been overlooked.

Hi doveman and welcome! My first 'guinea pig', nice! Hey, you're doing better than I am right now I'm having some issues with recent changes to livexp server downloads and trying to work out the bugs here, feel free to drop by and watch. Well, it sounds like I have overlooked something there; I have no idea why the Verify' script is checking for that file (doesn't on my machines) but I will edit the guide as soon as I get a chance to reflect this, thank you. See, you taught the tutorial writer something, I can tell you'll be writing your own guides soon

So, other than that did all come out OK? Any questions or other tips? Thanks buddy, glad to have you aboard!

Well first of all can I also extend a warm welcome to doveman and whats this I see a "newbie" 1st post & a fellow countryman, your Tutorial has attracted interest already Vote "The Newbies are coming...." also skip over to the voting section & see what one newbie has said, he's even got the audacity to quote you LOL!

Can I Please say it, with a smug look on my face & a wink in my eye & most of all absolutely NO hard feelings, I told you so, I couldn't have engineered this scenario better myself LOL!

Well first of all can I also extend a warm welcome to doveman and whats this I see a "newbie" 1st post & a fellow countryman, your Tutorial has attracted interest already Vote "The Newbies are coming...." also skip over to the voting section & see what one newbie has said, he's even got the audacity to quote you LOL!

Can I Please say it, with a smug look on my face & a wink in my eye & most of all absolutely NO hard feelings, I told you so, I couldn't have engineered this scenario better myself LOL!

Doveman, you have made my day & endorsed a concept in my own mind.

No hard feelings Amalux, lets shake on it, you are excellant!

Regards, Respect & Best Wishes,

ispy they are coming LOL!

Thanks buddy, no hard feelings of course and you are right, they are coming... and we're not ready for them! I've got a pretty devastating issue right now, playing out here and the current situation is that I can no longer successfully build the project as described in the tutorial! This problem arose yesterday (late) due to changes made beyond my control to the scripts that download from the livexp server. I have some ideas how this might be corrected but have to confer with those 'in the know' about such things before taking any further steps to avoid this type of problem in the future (or fix it now). Until then I'm going to post a big warning about this at the beginning of the tutorial that will probably scare a lot of potential users away but so be it, it would be irresponsible of me to not warn them up front. Anyway, I'm sure this will be worked out for the best in short order but wanted you to know what was happening and why.

Hi doveman and welcome! My first 'guinea pig', nice! Hey, you're doing better than I am right now I'm having some issues with recent changes to livexp server downloads and trying to work out the bugs here, feel free to drop by and watch. Well, it sounds like I have overlooked something there; I have no idea why the Verify' script is checking for that file (doesn't on my machines) but I will edit the guide as soon as I get a chance to reflect this, thank you. See, you taught the tutorial writer something, I can tell you'll be writing your own guides soon

So, other than that did all come out OK? Any questions or other tips? Thanks buddy, glad to have you aboard!

Hi amalux. Thanks for the warm welcome

It makes a nice change to have been useful. Usually I've just missed something obvious that only becomes obvious the second I press Reply

I've written a few guides but only for my brother who doesn't live locally, so I can't go round and sort things out for him (although I do resort to VNC'ing in to his PC from time to time!). He gets easily confused so it's good practice

In fact, the main reason I'm interested in booting Windows from CD is to make a bootable Windows CD (98 or XP) that will load into RAM and give him a clean enviroment for CD/DVD burning, rather than him having to shutdown loads of stuff manually each time. I got 98 loading from HD into RAM a while ago but there was a sticking point with loading it from CD with El Torito requiring 32-bit disc access to be disable, which rather slows things down.

I haven't quite got your project working yet.

One problem I had was a missing bootfix.bin, which wasn't in my source I386 folder for some reason. I've played around XP a bit, creating an unattended setup disc so I must have deleted it at some point but I got a copy from my original XP CD now.

I just got a zCopy error "Recommended RamDisk size 81MB" which seems to be from the BootSDI script. Followed by another one but it says 82MB this time! They don't seem to have been critical though, as the ISO has been created. I disabled the Run ISO in qEmu option just to simplify things, so maybe that had something to do it or perhaps it's because I've got the XP NTDETECT.COM in the BootSDI folder, rather than the SP2003 SP1 version (because I deleted it after reading psc's post but then got an error about missing BootSDI files and I figured if it works with the XP one it was easier to put a copy of that there than extract the SP2003 one again. Thinking about it though, that error might have been because I hadn't updated the path to the BootSDI files in Winbuilder )

Looking at the log (attached) there's a few registry hive write errors related to ControlSet001 (setupreg.hiv). Should I be concerned about these? They look mostly network or USB/HID related and the former could be because I unticked Network under drivers as I didn't think I'd need any network functionality. Was that a bad thing to do?

One thing I'm uncertain about is what I need to do if I want to rebuild. Do I need to delete anything or will it all be overwritten automatically. It's just that I've noticed that setupreg.hiv and setupreg.hiv.LOG remain locked and undeletable after Winbuilder's finished, so I'm wondering if this would cause problems when rebuilding. Would rebooting (which unlocks those files) be sufficient, or should I still be manually deleting stuff before starting again?

Anyway, glad to be aboard. Thanks for all your work getting us this far.

Well first of all can I also extend a warm welcome to doveman and whats this I see a "newbie" 1st post & a fellow countryman, your Tutorial has attracted interest already Vote "The Newbies are coming...." also skip over to the voting section & see what one newbie has said, he's even got the audacity to quote you LOL!

Can I Please say it, with a smug look on my face & a wink in my eye & most of all absolutely NO hard feelings, I told you so, I couldn't have engineered this scenario better myself LOL!

Doveman, you have made my day & endorsed a concept in my own mind.

No hard feelings Amalux, lets shake on it, you are excellant!

Regards, Respect & Best Wishes,

ispy they are coming LOL!

Hi ispy. Thanks to you also for the warm welcome.

Glad to have made your day. I normally discuss payment before endorsing anything but as I'm new here I'll make an exception and as it's only in your mind, I guess it doesn't really count anyway Just don't keep that smug look too long. The winds are a blowing around these ways a lot at the moment and you know what they say happens when it changes

It makes a nice change to have been useful. Usually I've just missed something obvious that only becomes obvious the second I press Reply

I've written a few guides but only for my brother who doesn't live locally, so I can't go round and sort things out for him (although I do resort to VNC'ing in to his PC from time to time!). He gets easily confused so it's good practice

In fact, the main reason I'm interested in booting Windows from CD is to make a bootable Windows CD (98 or XP) that will load into RAM and give him a clean enviroment for CD/DVD burning, rather than him having to shutdown loads of stuff manually each time. I got 98 loading from HD into RAM a while ago but there was a sticking point with loading it from CD with El Torito requiring 32-bit disc access to be disable, which rather slows things down.

I haven't quite got your project working yet.

One problem I had was a missing bootfix.bin, which wasn't in my source I386 folder for some reason. I've played around XP a bit, creating an unattended setup disc so I must have deleted it at some point but I got a copy from my original XP CD now.

I just got a zCopy error "Recommended RamDisk size 81MB" which seems to be from the BootSDI script. Followed by another one but it says 82MB this time! They don't seem to have been critical though, as the ISO has been created. I disabled the Run ISO in qEmu option just to simplify things, so maybe that had something to do it or perhaps it's because I've got the XP NTDETECT.COM in the BootSDI folder, rather than the SP2003 SP1 version (because I deleted it after reading psc's post but then got an error about missing BootSDI files and I figured if it works with the XP one it was easier to put a copy of that there than extract the SP2003 one again. Thinking about it though, that error might have been because I hadn't updated the path to the BootSDI files in Winbuilder )

Looking at the log (attached) there's a few registry hive write errors related to ControlSet001 (setupreg.hiv). Should I be concerned about these? They look mostly network or USB/HID related and the former could be because I unticked Network under drivers as I didn't think I'd need any network functionality. Was that a bad thing to do?

One thing I'm uncertain about is what I need to do if I want to rebuild. Do I need to delete anything or will it all be overwritten automatically. It's just that I've noticed that setupreg.hiv and setupreg.hiv.LOG remain locked and undeletable after Winbuilder's finished, so I'm wondering if this would cause problems when rebuilding. Would rebooting (which unlocks those files) be sufficient, or should I still be manually deleting stuff before starting again?

Anyway, glad to be aboard. Thanks for all your work getting us this far.

Hi doveman,

Yes, you've got a few errors there Nothing we can't work through but at this point I'm putting a hold on the whole tutorial/project until I can figure out what's going on; unfortunately, you were one of the few (I hope) that got stung by this bug and a lot of the errors you have encountered are related to this issue, including the 'Recommended RamDisk size... ' nonsense. This should never happen as the script options are set up to add 24MB above and beyond the size of your build image! Unless you're PC has less than 128MB RAM installed, this warning should never occur. I have been dealing with this 'crisis' all day (and all last night as well) see here, here and here to keep up with the latest attempts at fixing and avoiding future occurrences of this type of issue. In the meantime, be patient; these things always work out and we'll learn from it together like we always do here. I can tell you I've built many hundreds of boot disks like this one and many more advanced and there just isn't any better feeling than getting it setup and working with all the bells and whistles just the way you like it! I use my boot disks for everything from rescue, restore and new installs (so easy) to loading universal images on remote machines, the possibilities are endless and I just need to figure out how to translate that knowledge into a workable platform where others can benefit from tried and true procedures. The problem here is that I don't control what you are downloading from the livexp server and if changes are made that cause issues like this, it's very difficult to even determine what was done let alone how to fix it

Don't worry about all the little things with your build right now, I assure you you're not going to get a workable build until this issue is resolved; I can't! If all else fails and there's no resolution for this current situation, I'll try to set up a different approach where we go back to what I know works (earlier, more stable versions of WB and BootSDI) but this is only partially up to me and I need to confer with the good folks here first. Give it some time, the best thing to do is restore your drive back to before running WB (you did back up your drive as instructed, right?) It appears that this problem leaves some type of hard coded driver footprint that doesn't let go even after re-booting. Sorry, that's the way it is with computers sometimes... I'm off to restore my own drive and start testing more possible fix options; wish me luck and I'll let you know as soon as it's all worked out.

Thanks Amalux/doveman for your replies! Quite right, the smug look was only for a second or so & has been replaced with a sadened expression with the recent news on this topic. If there is anything I can do to help or provide assistance in some small way, just shout.

I hope you manage to resolve any shortcomings quickly so that you can remove the Header warning to your tutorial.

Looking at the log (attached) there's a few registry hive write errors related to ControlSet001 (setupreg.hiv). Should I be concerned about these? They look mostly network or USB/HID related and the former could be because I unticked Network under drivers as I didn't think I'd need any network functionality. Was that a bad thing to do?

What is very strange for me that your errors are exactly the same Amalux posted some time ago.

That was bad timing. I hope the newbie-haters don't use it as an excuse to banish us to the sandpit (only kidding. I'm sure there's no haters on here).

My condolences amalux on your present difficulties. I can imagine how frustrating it must be to have something beyond your control 'break' your project. I'm sure it will be back on track soon enough. Do let me know if there's anything I can do to help with testing stuff out.

I've got 1.5GB RAM so yeah, that's not the problem with the RAMdisk error.

Looking on the bright side of things, this gives me a chance to get on with the decorating

When the "Other Tweaks" script is executing, the setupreg.hiv seems to be locked.We have to find out whether it is grounded in the 'history' before "Other Tweaks"

Probably rather obvious, but I just thought to check the registry and saw that Tmp_setupreg_hiv remains loaded into HKLM even after Winbuilder is closed. Unloading it allows me to delete those two files I previously couldn't without rebooting.

Are there likely to be any complications if Winbuilder is run whilst this hive is still locked and loaded?

Probably rather obvious, but I just thought to check the registry and saw that Tmp_setupreg_hiv remains loaded into HKLM even after Winbuilder is closed. Unloading it allows me to delete those two files I previously couldn't without rebooting.

Are there likely to be any complications if Winbuilder is run whilst this hive is still locked and loaded?

Take this as rule:

Whenever there is an error in one script, there is no absolute guarantee that the following scripts bring the desired results, even if they are executed error free.